Comment by LightMachine
8 months ago
Right below install instructions, on Bend's README.md:
> But keep in mind our code gen is still on its infancy, and is nowhere as mature as SOTA compilers like GCC and GHC.
Second paragraph of Bend's GUIDE.md:
> While cool, Bend is far from perfect. In absolute terms it is still not so fast. Compared to SOTA compilers like GCC or GHC, our code gen is still embarrassingly bad, and there is a lot to improve. That said, it does what it promises: scaling horizontally with cores.
Limitations session on HVM2's paper:
> While HVM2 achieves near-linear speedup, its compiler is still extremely immature, and not nearly as fast as state-of-art alternatives like GCC of GHC. In single-thread CPU evaluation, HVM2, is still about 5x slower than GHC, and this number can grow to 100x on programs that involve loops and mutable arrays, since HVM2 doesn’t feature these yet.
> Right below install instructions
Yeah exactly. I read most of the readme and watched the demo, but I'm not interested in installing it so I missed this. I would recommend moving this to the first section in its own paragraph.
I understand you might not want to focus on this but it's important information and not a bad thing at all.
That's a great feedback actually, thank you.
We'll add the disclaimer before the install instructions instead!
Relatedly, the homepage itself doesnt make it obvious it’s still alpha, or not ready, or not actually going to speed up your code this moment - claims like “automatically achieves near-ideal speedup, up to 1000+ threads” - the point is that it parallelizes code, but the word speedup makes it sound like my code will get 1000x faster.
I think you can avoid this kind of criticism by setting expectations better - just plastering a banner at the top saying that it’s in early stage development and not optimized, but that the future is bright, for example. The current headline saying it’s the “parallel future of computation” isn’t really enough to make people understand that the future isn’t here yet.
Same goes for the README, the fact that it’s not production ready per-se really ought to be at the top to set people’s expectations properly IMO, since a lot of people will not read the whole wall of text and just jump straight into trying it out once they’re on your GitHub page.
They’re critical since they are led to have much higher expectations than what actually exists today.
That said, this is a cool project and wish you the best in making it really good!
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